Forever The World of Nightwalkers - By Jacquelyn Frank Page 0,12

length of his arms and his grip on the steering wheel.

“Nickname. I think it was football related or something.”

Okay now that was weird. Why did it feel like he was lying to her? If so, it was a really silly thing to lie about. What the hell did she care where the name came from? He could have said it was his alter ego’s name for all she cared. She’d heard stranger and weirder things in her career.

She decided to let it go. She told herself she was being oversensitive. After all, she had been on edge around him lately, waiting for his other promised shoe to drop. She’d been envisioning hundreds of scenarios, a thousand ways to face the application of his promised assault on her, and it had made her hypervigilant.

“We’re here,” he said abruptly, throwing the SUV into park. Sargent went wild, pacing in the back of the car, whining at an earsplitting pitch and consistency.

Marissa fumbled for the door handle on her side, determined not to look at the lean, powerful line of his athletic body in uniform with the autocratic weight of his gun belt and vest lending a quintessential air of powerful masculinity. She would not allow herself to devolve into some kind of girlish flirt who giggled and twirled her hair as she checked out the cop’s hot bod. Nope. That was so not her.

Mostly, she amended as she watched the sexy cop clip a leash onto his dog, bring him out of the car and, with a deep-throated sound, command him to heel. She would have to be dead as thoughag. not to notice how truly fine a male specimen he was. Watching him hold all that frenetic canine energy in abeyance was practically primal. Man and beast, moving as one, a team of ultimate power and strength.

She looked over the crowd of people assembled. Cops, civilians, EMTs, and every other sort of official she could imagine had been drummed up for the search. Something like this was a big deal in such a small town, and the local news crew was there right on schedule. But what she was looking for was …

There. Loss. Abject horror dulled by the weight of ultimate shock. Tears of disbelief quivering in the lashes of a woman being comforted by nearly a half-dozen people. The mother. The phalanx of loved ones surrounding her was keeping her protected from the media. There was that at least. But those loved ones would eventually become obstacles, in one way or another, that she would end up in contention with unless this situation resolved in a quick and harmless manner.

“How long?” she heard Jackson ask the chief of police—a tall, autocratic man with salt-flecked black hair and a pair of serious dark eyes. Devlin Morris was a good chief. He was just the right mix of hardcore cop and clever, diplomatic politician. He was accessible to the policemen and -women who worked under him, revered by them in many respects because he was a legendary figure on the force. Just the other day she had heard a story about him her patient had dubbed “The Polka-Dot Dress Story.” It said something about how far you had made it in the world, when people referred to your adventures in work and in life with a title.

“Best guess is three hours. She sent the kid to his friend’s house to play about four p.m. She figured he might have stayed for supper when he didn’t come back after a couple of hours and says she tried to call him then. When she finally got seriously worried, she called the friend’s house and found out he’d never gotten there.”

“Three hours then,” Jackson agreed grimly after a glance at his watch. She looked at hers even though she already knew it was close to seven p.m. They would assume the last sighting was at the time of the incident … whether that incident was accidental or by nefarious means … and work all following courses of action outward from there. For her part, she was looking at a mother who was no doubt kicking herself and asking why she hadn’t called the friend’s house sooner, why she hadn’t walked him there herself, why she had ever let him out of her sight in the first place.

But Marissa was also there for another reason. She looked carefully at each and every face that was there and was not obviously an official. She would consider